SECTORAL BARGAINING SYSTEM
Unions, business and bureaucrats in a cabal
Any future economic Codesa must examine the lessons learnt, stripped of labels and slogan, writes Jonathan Yudelowitz
Although potentially dangerous and violent, "storming" — the assertion of the merits of one competing view against another — ensures that fixed ideologies and assumptions are rightly treated as working hypotheses and not as facts, contrary to the insistence of their defenders. SA’s "storming" process produced workable postapartheid operating models in the political Codesa of the 1990s and labour relations in the 1970s and 80s. However, during the halcyon days after 1994, perhaps tired of robust debate, big labour, big business and central government bureaucrats established our sectoral bargaining system. With the arrogance of the powerful and believing themselves on the right side of history, they rationalised away or ignored the needs of the unorganised — especially small businesses and the unemployed. The engineers of SA’s economic future thus missed a unique opportunity to reset the structural inequalities left by apartheid, making the 1996 labour legislation a classic Pyrrhic vi...
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